MUSIC REVIEW; Noises Off! Making a Boombox Cacophony

By ANNE MIDGETTE

Published: December 20, 2004

Clear, cold night. Holiday in the city. The Christmas tree under the arch in Washington Square lines up perfectly with the red-green spire of the Empire State Building in the distance. Around the tree, hundreds of people standing and waiting for the start of an annual holiday tradition: making music in the streets.

Called ''Unsilent Night,'' the collaborative piece by the composer Phil Kline has been taking place every year since 1992, and has spread to other cities and even countries. Here is how it works: People show up at a specified meeting place with a boombox that can play cassettes. Mr. Kline prepares tapes in advance and distributes them. He has everyone start them at the same time, and then leads a parade of sound through the streets, droning and chiming and caroling.

How do you listen to ''Unsilent Night''? There actually is a CD on Cantaloupe Records, but part of what makes the piece is making it: being enfolded into a large, peaceful crowd gathered only to make music.

Heading east and passing a man in a doorway, I wondered what it was like to experience this mass of people with the sounds of bells and whistles undulating noisily past.

I walked with the crowd and carried a boom box, arguably a conflict of interest, since it placed the critic in the role of performer, although you could also argue that to walk without participating is not truly to experience the piece.

Lacking the crowd-estimating techniques of the N.Y.P.D., it is hard to estimate how many people showed up on Saturday night, but it was enough to extend a couple of blocks and stop traffic, creating a cacophonous descant of taxi horns at the corner of Cooper Square, while bewildered passers-by asked what was happening. ''What station are they all listening to?'' one woman entreated.

There were so many people that the music became a thin carpet of sound, spreading under the noises of the bustling crowd, which was sometimes divided (when, for example, insistent cars pushed through the parade on First Avenue), sometimes focused by a chance ambient happening (sounds echoing off the metal roof of a scaffold above the sidewalk on Third Avenue).

At its final point, Tompkins Square Park, the parade coalesced into a big circular mob, with sounds coming into focus and fading as you moved through the crowd. Gradually the noise died away, leaving hundreds of people joined in a moment of silence before breaking, with a whoop, into enthusiastic applause.

Photo: Phil Kline, far right, in Washington Square Park with participants in his collaborative piece ''Unsilent Night.'' (Photo by Michael Nagle for The New York Times)